Straight Bridesmaid, Bent Vows — Bonus Chapter

The Ceiling Fan — Three Months Later

by Aurora North

An exclusive epilogue to Straight Bridesmaid, Bent Vows. Too hot for Amazon. Sign up to unlock.

The Ceiling Fan

The rental house looks different in October.

The summer crowds are gone. The dune grass has gone gold. The ocean is darker, colder, the kind of gray-blue that belongs in a painting rather than a postcard. The string lights on the porch are off — nobody’s bothered to plug them in — and Captain the golden retriever is conspicuously absent, having stayed in New York with Drew and Sophie for the weekend.

We’re alone. Actually, genuinely, no-one-down-the-hall alone.

It was Rae’s idea. She texted me on a Tuesday: The house is available Columbus Day weekend. Just us. No wedding. No ceiling fan audience. Thoughts?

I texted back: Book it immediately.

She booked it immediately.

We pull into the gravel driveway in her Subaru — the same Subaru, the same crunch of gravel, the same salt-air smell through the cracked windows — and the sense memory hits me so hard I have to sit for a second after she kills the engine.

“You okay?” Rae asks.

“I’m processing.”

“Processing what?”

“The last time I was in this driveway, I didn’t know I was bi. I didn’t know I was in love with you. I didn’t know that a queen bed with a dip in the middle was going to dismantle my entire identity.”

“The mattress gets too much credit. I did most of the dismantling.”

“You did. With your mouth, primarily.”

She grins. The sharp, pleased grin that still — three months in, hundreds of kisses in, a drawer of her clothes in my apartment in — makes my stomach flip. “Let’s go inside.”

We carry our bags up the porch steps. The front door creaks the same way. The kitchen smells like old wood and sea air. Everything is familiar and nothing is the same, because the last time I walked through this door I was performing a version of myself that doesn’t exist anymore, and the woman beside me was someone I was hiding, and now she’s someone I hold hands with in grocery stores and kiss goodbye at train stations and introduce to my mother as my girlfriend, Rae.

I stand in the kitchen and look around — the island counter where we talked at midnight, the pantry where she kissed me against the shelves, the porch visible through the window where everything started — and something warm and enormous fills my chest.

“You’re doing the face,” Rae says.

“What face?”

“The face you do when you’re feeling something big and trying to organize it into a spreadsheet.”

“I don’t spreadsheet my emotions.”

“You absolutely spreadsheet your emotions. You have a tab for each one. I’ve seen it.”

I turn to her. She’s leaning against the counter, arms crossed, the late-afternoon light catching the silver in her nose ring and the dark ink on her forearm.

“The emotion I’m feeling right now doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet.”

“Try me.”

“I’m standing in the kitchen where I fell in love with you, and this time I get to say it out loud, and we have three days and no wedding party and no one to hide from, and I want to take you upstairs and not leave that bed until Monday.”

Her eyes darken. “Then why are we still in the kitchen?”

We go upstairs. The hallway. The bathroom with the bad fan. And then — the room.

The corner room. The pale blue walls. The ceiling fan with the wicker blade.

The bed.

One queen. White sheets. Two pillows on each side. The mattress that dips toward the center like it’s been waiting for us.

Rae reaches up and pulls the chain on the ceiling fan. It starts its slow rotation, the familiar click resuming like a heartbeat that’s been paused for three months.

“I can’t believe you turned it on,” I say.

“It’s part of the experience. Like ambient music.”

“The ceiling fan is not ambient music.”

“The ceiling fan is the soundtrack of your sexual awakening, Claire. Show some respect.”

“I want to redo the first night,” she says. “The way I wanted it to go. When you were lying six inches from me and I was counting your breaths and trying not to touch you.”

“How did you want it to go?”

“Lie down and I’ll show you.”

I lie down. Right side. My side. The sheets are cool against my arms and the mattress dips exactly the way it used to, and I look up at the ceiling fan — the same fan, the same wicker blade, the same slow rotation that I stared at during seven nights of accumulating desire that I couldn’t name.

Rae lies on the left. On her side, facing me. The position from the first night, every night.

“This is where I fell in love with you,” she says. “Right here. On this side of this bed, listening to you breathe, knowing I couldn’t touch you. Do you know how many times I imagined rolling over?”

“How many?”

“Every single night. Seven nights. I’d lie here and think about what would happen if I just — reached across. Put my hand on your hip. Pressed my mouth against the back of your neck.” Her hand crosses the six inches. Lands on my waist. “Like this.”

“And then what?”

“And then I’d imagine sliding your shirt up. Slowly. Kissing your shoulder. Your neck. The place behind your ear that makes you shiver.”

She pulls my shirt over my head. Her mouth finds the spot behind my ear and I shiver exactly the way she predicted, and her hands slide down my sides.

She undresses me slowly. Each piece of clothing removed with deliberate attention. My bra. My jeans, unbuttoned with one hand while her mouth traces my collarbone. My underwear, pulled down my hips with a slowness that’s either tender or sadistic or both.

I lie bare on the white sheets in the blue room and she looks at me the way she looked at me the very first time — but without the fear. Without the fragility. With the settled, certain gaze of a woman who knows this body belongs to her.

“No one down the hall,” she says, pulling her own shirt off. “No one in the next room. No footsteps to freeze for.”

“No hand over my mouth.”

“I want to hear every sound you make. The version of you that doesn’t hold anything back.”

She kisses me. Deep, thorough, her tongue sliding against mine while her hand travels down my body. She traces circles on my inner thigh, close but not close enough, and I feel myself getting wetter by the second.

“Rae. Stop teasing.”

“I’m not teasing. I’m doing what I imagined for seven nights. And in my imagination, I took my time.”

“Your imagination is a sadist.”

“My imagination has excellent taste.”

She dips her head and takes my nipple in her mouth and sucks, gentle and then firm, and the sensation arrows straight between my legs and I moan — full volume, uninhibited, the sound filling the room. The ceiling fan clicks overhead. And I make sounds I’ve been moderating for three months, because the filter was always on. Even at the apartments. Even when we were alone.

Not here. Not now.

Her mouth moves lower. She pauses at my hip bone and bites — gently, then harder, a sting that melts into warmth — and I cry out and grab the sheets.

“You like that,” she says against my skin. Not a question.

“You know I like that.”

“I know. I want to hear you say it.”

“I like it when you bite me. I like — oh god, Rae, please —”

“Please what? Say it.”

“Please put your mouth on me. I need your tongue on me right now.”

She gives me what I’m begging for.

The first touch of her tongue is a slow, flat stroke from bottom to top, and the moan that tears out of me is louder than anything I’ve ever produced during sex. It fills the room. It fills the house.

“That,” she says, lifting her head for one devastating second. “That’s the sound I’ve been waiting three months to hear.”

She seals her mouth over me and stops talking. Her tongue finds the rhythm she knows — the one calibrated specifically to my body — and she runs it with merciless precision. Slow circles that tighten. Pressure that builds and eases and builds again.

She slides two fingers inside me. Curls them on the first stroke, finds the spot that makes my vision tunnel, and holds it. Her mouth doesn’t pause. The dual sensation is so overwhelming that I lose track of my own body.

“Don’t stop — fuck, right there — don’t you dare —”

She adds a third finger. The stretch makes me gasp and she looks up, checking, and I grab the back of her head and push her back down.

I come. The orgasm rips through me with a force that arches my back off the mattress and locks every muscle in my body. I scream — actually scream, a raw, ragged sound that I’ve never made during sex in my life, a sound that exists only in this house, in this room, with no filter. My thighs clamp around her head. The contractions pulse around her fingers in waves that crest and recede and crest again, and she works me through every one.

Before the last wave subsides, she changes the angle. Her thumb replaces her tongue on my clit — firm, insistent — and her fingers inside me shift to a faster, shallower rhythm that targets the spot already oversensitized from the first orgasm.

“I can’t — Rae, I just —”

“You can. One more.”

“I can’t —”

“You can.” She lifts her head. Her chin is wet, her eyes are black. “I’ve got you. Let go.”

The second orgasm builds on the ruins of the first — not a wave but a detonation, a single blinding pulse of pleasure that radiates from her fingers through my core and out through my limbs and I come with tears on my cheeks and no sound at all, my mouth open, my body locked, the silence louder than the scream.

She eases her fingers out. Kisses her way up my body. She reaches my mouth and I taste myself on her lips and pull her in and kiss her with everything I have left.

“I think I died.”

“You didn’t die. You came twice in four minutes. There’s a difference.”

“Barely.”

I recover faster than expected. Twenty minutes later, lying in her arms with the ceiling fan clicking and the October light going golden, I feel the heat kindle again when she shifts beneath me and her thigh presses between mine.

“Your turn,” I say.

“You don’t have to —”

“Rae Ellison. If you finish that sentence, I’m going to be personally offended.”

I push her onto her back. Straddle her hips. Look down at her — dark hair on the white pillow, tattoo sleeve vivid against the sheets.

“The first time I went down on you,” I say, trailing my fingernails down her stomach. “After the rehearsal dinner. I was nervous. My hands were shaking. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You didn’t do it wrong.”

“No. But I was cautious. Careful. Learning.” I lean down. Press my mouth to her sternum. “I’m not careful anymore.”

I move down her body with a confidence that would have been impossible three months ago. I know what Rae likes. I’ve spent three months learning — in her bed, in my bed, on her couch, against her kitchen counter, in the shower that one time that was logistically ambitious and completely worth it.

I settle between her thighs and look up at her. She’s propped on her elbows, looking down at me with an expression that’s half desire and half wonder.

“I’m going to make you come so hard the ceiling fan stops,” I say.

“That’s not how physics works.”

“Let’s find out.”

I lower my mouth. I don’t start slow. I go straight to the place she needs me, with the pressure she needs, and the sound she makes — a sharp, guttural moan — is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever heard.

I work her with my tongue and my fingers simultaneously, the way she taught me, the way I’ve refined over a hundred nights. My tongue circles while two fingers thrust deep, curling on the stroke, and she falls back against the pillows and grabs the headboard with both hands.

“Claire — fuck — your mouth —”

I moan against her. The vibration makes her hips buck and I pin them down with my free hand, holding her still while I work, and the restraint makes her louder. She’s always louder when she can’t move — when I hold her hips and take away her ability to control the pace and she has to just feel it.

“I’m going to come — Claire, don’t stop, right there, don’t —”

I don’t stop. I press deeper with my fingers, seal my mouth tighter, and she comes with a cry that rattles the windows — a long, shuddering orgasm that pulses against my tongue and goes on and on while I hold her through it.

She collapses. I crawl up and she pulls me down and kisses me deeply, her own taste on my lips.

“The ceiling fan is still going,” she murmurs.

“I’ll try harder next time.”

“Next time is in about thirty minutes.”

“Deal.”

Next time is not in thirty minutes. Next time is in twelve, because we’re lying face to face, talking about nothing, and her hand is resting on my hip drawing lazy circles, and the circles migrate lower, and suddenly we’re kissing again.

This time is different. Slower. No one on top, no one in charge. We lie on our sides, face to face — the position from a hundred shared nights — and we touch each other at the same time.

Her fingers find me. Mine find her. We start at the same moment, watching each other’s faces, and the intimacy of it — the mutual vulnerability, the shared rhythm, the eye contact that neither of us breaks — is more intense than anything we’ve done today.

“I see you,” she whispers. The words from the Outer Banks. From the night we lay face to face and came together for the first time.

“I see you too.”

We move together. The pace syncs without discussion. The old mattress dips toward the center and we let it pull us closer, let gravity do what it’s been doing since the first night — drawing us together, collapsing the distance, making the middle inevitable.

We come within seconds of each other — her first, a sharp gasp and a shudder that I feel through her fingers and her thighs and her chest pressed against mine, and the sight of her face as she breaks apart pushes me over the edge behind her. The orgasm is quiet this time — a deep, rolling wave while our foreheads press together and our fingers stay intertwined and our breathing mingles in the inch between our mouths.

The light changes. The sun drops below the dunes and the room goes amber, then blue, then dark. We don’t turn on a lamp. We lie in the center of the bed and talk and touch and drift.

At some point, Rae orders pizza from her phone without lifting her head from my chest. The delivery driver leaves it on the porch. She retrieves it in my flannel and nothing else, which I watch from the upstairs window with the specific, possessive satisfaction of a woman who gets to see Rae Ellison’s bare legs on a regular basis.

We eat in bed. Pepperoni. Paper towels for plates.

“Rae?”

“Mm.”

“Do you think the mattress knew?”

“Knew what?”

“That we’d end up here. In the middle. Together.”

“The mattress is an inanimate object, Claire.”

“The mattress is a romantic visionary and I won’t hear otherwise.”

She laughs. She presses her lips to the top of my head and says: “The mattress didn’t know. I did. I knew the first night.”

“You knew we’d end up together?”

“I knew I’d never stop wanting to. Whether we ended up together was always up to you.”

“It’s up to me. And I choose this. Every time. Every night. Every dip in every mattress.”

In the morning, I wake to the click of a pencil on paper.

Rae is sitting up in bed, sketchbook propped against her knee, drawing. She’s wearing my T-shirt and her hair is messy and the early light falls across her face in a way that makes her look like a painting I’d hang in every room of my life.

“Are you drawing me?” I ask, voice rough with sleep.

“I’m drawing the fan. You happen to be in the composition.”

“Liar.”

“Fine. I’m drawing you.” She turns the sketchbook. It’s me, asleep — hair across the pillow, one arm above my head, the sheet draped across my hip. Intimate. Tender. The trust of sleeping unguarded next to someone you love.

“You drew this while I was sleeping?”

“It’s what I do. First morning, remember? Three seconds. Except now I don’t have to limit myself. I can look as long as I want.”

She sets the sketchbook aside. Slides down until we’re face to face.

“Two more days,” she says. “Two more days in this room, in this bed, with this fan. What do you want to do?”

“Everything. I want to sit on the porch and eat breakfast and walk on the beach and come back to this bed and not leave it for hours. I want to hear the fan click while you touch me. I want to fall asleep in the middle and wake up with your arm around me and not pull away.”

“You haven’t pulled away in three months.”

“I know. And it still feels like a miracle every morning.”

She kisses me. Soft, unhurried, the kiss of two people who have nowhere to be and no one to perform for and all the time in the world.

The ceiling fan clicks overhead. The ocean exhales outside the window. The mattress dips toward the center, and we let it.

The right side of the bed was never the right side.

It was always the middle.

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